Trains your brain

"In a study published in the journal Neurolmage in 2009, Luders and her colleagues compared the brains of
22 meditators and 22 age-matched nonmeditators and found that meditators (who practiced a wide range
of traditions and had between five and 46 years of meditation experience) had more gray matter in regions
of the brain that are important for attention, emotion regulation, and mental flexibility. Luders believes
that the increased gray matter in the meditators' brains should make them better at controlling their
attention, managing their emotions, and making mindful choices."

"More and more neuroscientists, like Luders, have started to think that learning to meditate is no different
from learning mental skills such as music or maths. Like anything that requires practice, meditation
is a training program for the brain." Luders explains "These tiny changes, in thousands of connections,
can lead to visible changes in the structure of the brain. "Those structural changes, in turn, create
a brain that is better at doing whatever you've asked it to do. Musician's brains may get better at solving
problems. What do meditators' brains get better at doing? This is where it gets interesting: it depends
on what type of meditation they do."

"Over the past decade, researchers have found that if you practice focusing attention on your breath or a
mantra, the brain will restructure itself to make concentration easier. If you practice calm acceptance
during meditation, you will develop a brain that is more resilient to stress. And if you meditate while
cultivating feelings of love and compassion, your brain will develop in such a way that you spontaneously
feel more connected to others."

Improve your attention

"New research shows that meditation can help you improve your ability to concentrate in two ways. First,
it can make you better at focusing on something specific while ignoring distractions. Second, it can
make you more capable of noticing what is happening around you, giving you a fuller perspective on the
present moment. Research is being conducted by Richard Davidson and the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience
at the University of Wisconsin and Antoine Lutz, PhD, an associate scientist at the Waisman Laboratory
for Brain Imaging and Behaviour at the Unviersity of Wisconsin at Madison."

For illustration purposes only - publicly available image from University of California demonstrating brain
activity